None of the guidelines included in either study was fully compliant with National Academy of Medicine standards, which include written disclosure, appointing committee chairs or cochairs with no conflicts of interest, and keeping committee members with conflicts to a minority of the committee membership, wrote Colette DeJong, MD, and Robert Steinbrook, MD, in an accompanying editorial. In the study by Khan et al., “Notably, 14 of the 18 panels had chairs with industry payments, and 10 had a majority of members with payments,” they wrote.

However, the federal government has so far shown no interest in supporting a fully independent entity to develop clinical practice guidelines, as occurs in the United Kingdom via the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. “Preparation of guidelines by an independent public body with assured funding and independence could be an effective approach, not only for eliminating issues related to financial conflicts of interest but also for assuring the use of rigorous methodologies and avoiding the wasteful duplication of efforts by multiple committees,” they wrote.

Financial conflicts in clinical practice guidelines persist in the United States in part because many professional societies have financial conflicts with industry, the editorialists wrote.

Dr. DeJong is affiliated with the University of California, San Francisco; Dr. Steinbrook is Editor at Large for JAMA Internal Medicine. They had no financial conflicts to disclose.

FROM JAMA INTERNAL MEDICINE

Financial conflicts are often underreported by authors of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) in several specialties including oncology, rheumatology, and gastroenterology, according to a pair of research letters published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The Institute of Medicine recommends that guideline authors include no more than 50% individuals with financial conflicts.

In one research letter, Rishad Khan, BSc, of the University of Toronto in Ontario and his colleagues reviewed data on undeclared financial conflicts of interest among authors of guidelines related to high-revenue medications.

The researchers identified CPGs via the National Guideline Clearinghouse and selected 18 CPGs for 10 high-revenue medications published between 2013 and 2017. Financial conflicts of interest were based on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Open Payments.

Of the 160 authors involved in the various guidelines, 79 (49.4%) disclosed a payment in the CPG or supplemental materials, and 50 (31.3%) disclosed payments from companies marketing 1 of the 10 high-revenue medications in the related guidelines.

Another 41 authors (25.6%) received but did not disclose payments from companies marketing 1 of the 10 high-revenue medications in CPGs.

Overall, 91 authors (56.9%) were found to have financial conflicts of interest that involved 1 of the 10 high-revenue medications, and “the median value of undeclared payments from companies marketing 1 of the 10 high-revenue medications recommended in the CPGs was $522 (interquartile range, $0-$40,444) from two companies,” the researchers said.

The study findings were limited by several factors including “potential inaccuracies in CMS-OP reporting, which are rarely corrected, and lack of generalizability outside the United States” and by the limited time frame for data collection, which may have led to underestimation of conflicts for the guidelines, the researchers noted. In addition, “we did not have access to guideline voting records and thus did not know when conflicted panel members recommended against a medication or recused themselves from voting,” they said.

Mr. Khan disclosed research funding from AbbVie and Ferring Pharmaceuticals.